For over forty years, Iran’s expansive southwestern oil resources were the exclusive domain of the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (today BP P.L.C., or British Petroleum). Possessing the world’s biggest oil refinery, the AIOC was Britain’s largest and most important foreign asset; it facilitated Britain’s international predominance by providing fuel for British war efforts, imperial enterprises, and domestic needs. Much scholarly work has been devoted to political and economic analyses of the AIOC’s power in Iran, detailing numerous instances of economic exploitation and political maneuvering by the oil company as it worked to secure its ascendant position in the country. Less attention, however, has been focused on the AIOC’s extensive social programs, which, while initially restricted to the company’s European employees, were later extended to its Iranian staff and laborers as well as the residents of surrounding areas. This paper examines three main aspects of the AIOC’s social programs in Khuzestan: its construction and financing of primary, secondary, and technical educational institutions; its provision of medical care and implementation of public health programs; and its erection of social clubs and sporting facilities and concomitant encouragement of company employees to participate in athletics and other leisure activities. In the mid-1930s, as the AIOC commenced with hiring a greater number of Iranians following a mandate from the Iranian government, the company began to invest in social programs for Iranians. While company propaganda presents the implementation of these programs as evidence of its benevolence, this paper argues that such programs were integral components of the AIOC’s civilizing project in Khuzestan. This civilizing project aimed, through the promotion of education, physical health and fitness, and various forms of discipline, to transform southwest Iran’s pastoral-nomadic and sedentary tribal peoples – regularly described in AIOC documents as “savages” – into a class of industrial laborers and to also cultivate a cadre of loyal, efficient, and able-bodied Iranian employees who would be capable of working in clerical, technical, and even managerial capacities for the company. Relying on primary sources from the British National Archives and the BP Archive – such as annual company reports, medical correspondences, propaganda pamphlets, and the oil company’s monthly magazine – this paper contends that the AIOC, by implementing wide-ranging social programs as part of a civilizing project, assumed the character of a modern colonial state in southwestern Iran.